Intelligent Workload Management

Cloud Turf Wars

RichardWhitehead — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:35:00 GMT

In the early days of cell phones, providers faced little competition, but as more providers came online, they began undercutting each other on price. We’ll soon see the same trends take hold in cloud services. Behemoths like AT&T have such massive data center infrastructure already in place they can easily blow away tier 2 players with aggressive price offerings.

But much like the cell phone game, things won’t remain status quo for long. Soon the AT&Ts of the world will need to differentiate through added convenience and capabilities. As they did in the wireless business, companies like AT&T were savvy enough to realize that they needed unique service offerings to compete in the long run. Hence, the emergence of branded smart phones, family plans, parental controls, special ring tones, and more. There are even service plans for specific markets, such as offerings for military families and frequent business travelers.

As we see more widespread adoption of cloud computing, cloud providers will move beyond price wars to value-add wars. The value-add could come in any number of forms. With so many regulations facing today’s enterprises, I’m willing to bet that the added value will be around guaranteeing regulatory compliance. A cloud provider, for example, market cloud services with guaranteed HIPAA compliance to health care providers. Service differentiators could also involve service level guarantees.

There’s no question that the strategic vendors of tomorrow will be companies the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Vodacom and others who already have the infrastructure and the business acumen to dominate the cloud market.

Who are you betting will lead the way in cloud offerings?

Private clouds taking hold

BenjaminGrubin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:31:00 GMT

Just a year ago, we were seeing an almost universal trend of enterprises taking a serious look at adopting public cloud. After all, it’s a way to save a ton of money and get out from under the burden of heavyweight infrastructure.

This past year we’ve seen a significant shift in the perception of cloud. While businesses recognize the financial advantage of public cloud, they are gravitating to a private cloud model first. They’re looking at how to develop the processes and capabilities to handle cloud computing. The concept of mobile workloads is a central tenet to the success of clouds, whether they’re public or private.

Private cloud is now recognized by the majority of the market as a mature, viable option for attacking the major challenges of delivering and managing IT services. Forrester Research concurs. During a recent SearchCloudComputing roundtable, Rich Fichera, vice president, principal analyst for Forrester Research commented, “private cloud is real, and has a tremendous value. That’s the right stepping stone for many businesses.”

The results of a recent Harris Interactive survey showed very clearly that enterprises are moving to private cloud in a big way. 75 percent of IT leaders said they had adopted or were in the process of adopting private cloud, and actually referred to it as a stepping stone to public cloud. Clearly, the majority of respondents were holding back from adopting public cloud due to security and compliance issues, however, they recognized the next logical step is public cloud.

It’s also interesting to note that managers don’t see public cloud as an “all or nothing” proposition. 87 percent of respondents believe public cloud computing adoption will occur alongside of, instead of replacing, company-owned data centers. It’s true there will always be some core applications that must reside within the enterprise’s four walls.

The economic benefits are undeniable. When businesses have access to gigantic data centers with thousands of racks, they gain compute and storage capacity at a much better price than you could do yourself in-house. Thus, the question isn’t whether or not to adopt public cloud. It’s how do we do so safely and efficiently?

The benefits of intelligent workload management for SaaS providers

RichardWhitehead — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:28:00 GMT

Recently, I talked about how enterprises are benefiting from intelligent workload management (IWM). But they aren't the only ones capitalizing on this technology. SaaS vendors leverage IWM capabilities to rapidly adjust data center capabilities based on customer needs. IWM technologies also enable them to securely host data for multiple customers in the cloud and validate that these security measures are in place?overcoming a major barrier to acceptance of public cloud services.

SaaS providers struggle with the same data center challenges as large enterprises: managing heterogeneous environments, improving resource utilization, reducing labor costs and ensuring security and compliance. Making workloads intelligent helps overcome these issues.

Overcoming security concerns
Having a consistent framework for managing identities across a multi-tenant architecture brings far greater security measures while alleviating a tremendous strain on staff previously burdened with managing tasks such as account provisioning/deprovisioning. This approach also benefits the SaaS provider?s end users, who can authenticate once and then gain access to all necessary resources, regardless of whether they reside in physical, virtual or cloud environments.

Maximizing IT resources
SaaS providers can further reduce labor costs with a more intelligent approach to system configuration and operation. By having one consistent application image (or workload) that can be deployed on any platform, they?re able to leverage the most cost-effective hardware available.

Speeding time-to-market of new applications
In addition, SaaS providers can assemble multiple workloads together to swiftly deliver new business services their clients demand. The IWM model gives SaaS providers a strong way to stand out from the crowd.

For example, a major IT outsourcing firm is extending its security and compliance capabilities to its clients. Using a variety of IWM technologies, the firm is securing, managing and measuring the hosted services they deliver to their clients. By integrating identity and systems management capabilities into each application workload, they can manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven manner.

Are your SaaS providers taking advantage of IWM technology?

Is Private Cloud More Than Virtualization?

BenjaminGrubin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:25:00 GMT

Many people are under the misconception that private cloud is merely virtualizing their IT infrastructure. Yet it’s actually much more than that.

Cloud is more than a shared pool of resources. A well executed cloud environment encompasses attributes such as elasticity and scalability, as well as the ability for self-provisioning, self-service and granular metering of services. It’s these attributes that enable businesses to realize the promise of agility and significant cost savings.

Virtualization is an important first step toward a private cloud in that it helps businesses reduce the amount of physical hardware needed to run applications. But that’s just a stepping stone. Enterprises need service-level management to ensure that promised quality of service levels are maintained. Moreover, business users today expect to interact with IT resources directly. With private cloud, they can select from a catalog of business services, and have visibility into the actual cost of these services. Likewise, businesses drive down administrative costs through automated provisioning and deprovisioning and metering of services for chargeback purposes. With the private cloud model, both the IT side and the business side of the organization run more smoothly. IT staff is free from the cumbersome manual tasks of allocating IT services, while business users are armed with the knowledge to make more informed decisions about consuming IT services.

Virtualization tools alone will not enable businesses to achieve this vision. They need to create a self-aware environment with inherent knowledge of service levels, roles and privileges. While there were tools in the past that attempted to perform these tasks, they tended to be more parallel.

In other words, legacy tools were successful at performing a set of automation tasks, but they lacked the ability to interact with a fluid, amorphous pool of resources in real time.

Today, enterprises have access to new intelligent workload management tools that support the creation and management of private clouds. There is no one discrete tool that provides intelligent workload management, however. Enterprises are utilizing numerous tools that make their assets more secure, compliant and portable. Primarily, these tools fall into four categories:

Build - Build intelligent workloads that are portable and have identity, security and management services integrated right into the application.
Secure - Ensure the right levels of data protection and regulatory compliance while controlling access.
Manage - Manage and move workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments to optimize workload execution.
Measure - Measure workload performance and monitor security events in a real-time, identity-aware fashion.

While virtualization has brought about significant savings, it’s even more exciting to see how private clouds are transforming the way businesses consume and manage IT assets.

Where do you see private clouds adding the most value for your business?

Intelligent Workload Management: Tackling the Unknown with Ease

RichardWhitehead — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:23:00 GMT

T departments are under increased pressure to adapt technical resources to meet unanticipated changes. Virtualization is an important step toward achieving this goal. By dissolving the bonds between software and hardware, virtualization enables us to create a set of portable workloads that can be adapted and moved to meet ever-shifting business needs. Whether a business is facing an unprecedented spike in bandwidth needs or a new regulatory mandate, the ability to shift workloads “on the fly” is imperative.

In fact, the ability to profile, move, copy, protect and replicate workloads between physical and virtual hosts is a key enabler for success in today’s frenetically-paced business environments. However, virtualization alone will not get us there. After all, virtualization helps us get our data center in an optimized state, but it will not remain that way for long. True optimization—and agility—requires a fresh approach to data center management.

It’s great that we can move workloads to suit changing needs, but doing so manually is just not feasible. It’s not scalable and it introduces considerable risk. Risks could include inadvertently placing confidential data in a workload running in the public cloud, or not having the time to manually patch and update all the workloads. Even those managing a few hundred servers find it impossible to continually monitor ever-shifting utilization rates and adapt workloads accordingly. Moreover, even if an enterprises had the IT resources to handle this task manually, it’s really not a great use of IT’s core competencies.

The ability to automatically shift workloads in response to changes in utilization rates and other factors can have a tremendous financial benefit. Automating these processes provides increased agility and efficiency, along with significantly lower operating costs. If, for example, a retailer experiences unprecedented demand for a new product, the last thing they want is for their online ordering system to freeze up due to lack of computing resources.

To avoid this problem, the retailer could set a policy where the system automatically identifies a new host once the server utilization level reaches 85 percent. This fulfills multiple needs. It allows the retailer to adapt its infrastructure at a moment’s notice to maximize new sales. And it frees them to do so without requiring IT intervention. Ultimately, the ability to adapt workloads in real time provides a significant business advantage.

Where do you see this model delivering the most value in your business?

Identity-Based and Location-Aware Endpoint Management

GrantHo — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:20:00 GMT

We talk a lot here about how intelligent workloads are those that are self-aware and can therefore abide by appropriate security protocols. The same can be said for endpoints, such as laptops, desktops and mobile devices. There’s a growing demand to make endpoint devices similarly self-aware based on who's using them and where they're being used.

In a hospital setting, for example, doctors and nurses work among many different terminals throughout the day. These users move throughout the hospital, on different floors, and need access to multiple endpoints like workstations, kiosks and mobile devices. As a result, it’s essential that the endpoint (or desktop) “follow” the user, both to improve productivity and tighten security.

If the desktop follows the user, then no matter where the user logs in, he will always have access to all the applications, tools and settings they’re authorized to use. The user will always get the resources they need to perform their job because the device knows who they are. This can be enabled through password protection, or a combination of a password and some additional authentication such as a fingerprint or physical badge.

This identity-based approach to endpoint management can be extended further to gain additional security and productivity benefits. If I decide to log in next week from my grandmother’s house while I’m away for the holiday, my company’s endpoint management solution should contain the intelligence to know not only who I am, but also that I’m accessing the system via a slow connection, and apply rules accordingly. This might mean delivering a scaled-down, thin version of my desktop to prevent system delays. This way I can get the work done that I need, without unnecessary constraints.

In addition to applying policies based on who I am, it should also be applying policies based on where I am. If I’m using my laptop at Starbucks, I may be accessing an unsecured wireless network. Knowing that I’m using an unsecured wireless network in the café, my endpoint management solution should automatically enact additional security measures, such an encrypting any data before I transmit it.

Taking this one step further, enterprises could use endpoint management solutions to enforce additional policies such as power settings. Instead of relying on users to power down, the solution could enact policies such as automatic power down after a certain period of time. This may seem like a trivial thing, but reducing power consumption automatically across all endpoints could result in significant cost savings for large businesses.

These are just a few of the ways we’re envisioning endpoint management solutions being used in the future. What policies would you like to see managed through your endpoint management solution?

Don’t Trap your Workloads

RichardWhitehead — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:20:00 GMT

As we discussed in an earlier post, the concept of intelligent workload management (IWM) is beginning to take hold in many organizations. By creating discrete workloads—lightweight combinations of software functionality and operating systems in an easy-to-use package—businesses can move toward greater portability and manageability across heterogeneous environments.

Yet each new server or hypervisor requires another management tool. This is not only a time-consuming hassle for administrators, it hinders them from gaining a comprehensive view into resources. This severely limits their ability to optimize their environment. To make matters worse, these myriad tools restrict movement of workloads by making it difficult if not impossible to reverse decisions. If, for example, an organization uses VMware to turn a physical server into a virtual machine, there’s no way to reverse this move down the road as needs change. It can’t be moved to a different platform, virtual host or physical machine. These disparate tools can actually trap a workload on a particular operating system or platform.

IT managers need to eradicate these problems. First, they must have tools that provide full visibility across the IT infrastructure. Second, they need true interoperability so that they can move any workload, from physical to virtual, virtual to virtual and virtual to physical environments, no matter the platform, operating system or hypervisor type. Having a single point of control is the only way to achieve real agility.

They also need to pay attention how workloads are moved. That’s where the IWM model comes in again. Instead of just porting an operating system, why not move the entire workload as one “container”. Using new management tools, IT can move the entire contents of a machine, without having to rebuild the system. If an SAP application has outgrown its current server host, for example, the IT manager can simply migrate it to a new host in its entirety, instead of having to rebuild it from scratch. This allows important resource shifts to be made within minutes instead of days or weeks.

This capability is becoming increasingly important. No matter how frequently resource demands increase or change, IT can easily move workloads around in seconds. This is also helpful for hardware refreshes. It’s much easier to decommission old machines and move workloads to new sever hardware if you don’t have to build everything from scratch. Moving workloads in their entirely saves an incredible amount of time over reinstalling the applications and operating systems, and it gives organizations the ability to diversify their hardware platform as needed.

What do you think about IWM? Has your organization begun to embrace the concept of workload management?

How Virtual Appliances Reduce Sales Friction - Part 2

MApplebaum — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:15:00 GMT

Last week I wrote about how software appliances can reduce sales friction. Today I want to elaborate on how appliances make this possible.

Software and virtual appliances package your application in a compact, portable form factor that greatly reduces the complexity of installation and configuration. Since most applications don’t need the full breadth of today’s high-powered operating systems, software appliances also allow you to reduce the OS to just what’s needed, which slims down the footprint of the appliance.

Customers just download your evaluation appliance, install it on bare metal or a hypervisor, and boot it. It really is that simple.

By slashing the time and complexity involved with most enterprise software evaluations and proofs of concept (POCs), appliances make it easy for customers to quickly experience the product’s benefits. Rather than wrestling with the configurations of his operating system, database, middleware, network settings and so on, your customer is already using your software and focusing on how it can deliver value to his business.

Case in point: ROC Software wanted a way for customers to experience its product, without having to go through a traditional installation. To solve this challenge, the ISV built an appliance version of its EasySpooler software. This application workload contains the operating system, EasySpooler software, required dependencies and the configuration files needed to operate. Because everything is pre-installed and pre-configured, customers can even load the software on their desktops instead of having to install and configure it on their servers. ROC’s users appreciate the immediacy and ease of use of the solution.

This approach gives forward-thinking ISVs a huge competitive advantage when delivering evaluations and proofs of concept. Virtual appliances allow software providers to demonstrate the value of their software in just minutes, eliminating a major source of sales friction and accelerating sales velocity.

What’s holding you back from building your first virtual appliance?

ISVs, IWM and the Easiest Way to Crush Your Software Sales Targets

MApplebaum — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:51:00 GMT

As we kick off 2011, many ISVs are looking at the business plans they thoughtfully crafted last fall and are now building out detailed plans and tactics to hit those numbers. But if you’re like most software providers we talk with, you’re now wondering just how you will hit those growth targets. Sure, the economy is continuing to slowly recover and global IT spending is predicted to grow 5.7%. But that may not be enough. That’s why the increasingly popular approach of virtual appliances can help.

One of the key challenges we see ISVs facing today is how to reduce sales friction – removing or mitigating obstacles that slow the development of a customer relationship and conversion of a prospect into a customer. With today’s complex sales cycles, there is considerable friction to contend with.

Selling cycles are getting longer and involving more parties. As businesses strive to keep costs down (and rationalize vendors), ISVs must jump through more hoops to win a sale. And they must convince not just the IT director but often the COO or CFO – not to mention the line of business executive – of the value of their product.

From the customer’s perspective, the ideal buying scenario is one of instant gratification – one without friction. In the consumer world, this is easy. When you want a song, you go to your favorite online music store, find it, play a snippet and then buy it if you like the sample. Evaluation and purchase are simple.

Unfortunately, buying – and selling – enterprise software is nothing like this. Unlike with digital music, the software sales process involves many time-consuming steps: reach a potential customer, identify business need, map that need to your offerings, convince the prospect to evaluate your software with a trial or proof of concept, install and configure the evaluation software, troubleshoot any problems that arise, and so on. All this must happen before the customer can even begin to experience your product’s value firsthand.

The part of the process that should involve the least friction – getting the evaluation running – is where it often slows way down, because each customer’s computing infrastructure is unique. Issues with the evaluation just raise additional questions and can kill your momentum.

One solution that ISVs are finding effective in dramatically shortening the evaluation stage is software and virtual appliances. These are pre-configured combinations of an application, middleware and operating system, integrated into a single image and built to run on industry-standard hardware and virtualization platforms. Instead of the ISV or customer spending great time installing, configuring and fine-tuning the demo software, the customer simply downloads a self-contained, easy to install appliance that can be used immediately in any common IT environment.

By shifting the way software is packaged and delivered, appliances give ISVs a way to slash sales friction and accelerate sales velocity.

How do you plan to hit your sales growth targets in 2011?

Coming out from underground: Gaining visibility into cloud applications

RichardWhitehead — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:40:00 GMT

As CIOs are all too aware, business users are turning to SaaS and cloud applications in droves. No longer are they willing to make a purchase requisition and wait months for a new server to be acquired to support the software they need. They simply pull out their business credit card, and voila, in a matter of minutes they’ve downloaded what they need.

Instead of fretting over how to stop this, let’s look at why it’s happening in the first place. First, for many business needs, the traditional snail’s pace of on-boarding new applications simply doesn’t work any longer. Second, users often perceive IT as a gatekeeper, not an ally.

Fortunately, there are several trends converging that can help businesses overcome this source of friction.

Automating low-value tasks. IT administrators have long been burdened with an endless array of mind-numbing tasks such as manually provisioning and deprovisioning accounts, dealing with password issues and more. Thus, every new business request felt like an added drain on IT staff, and perhaps understandably, was not met with a positive response.
Gaining visibility. Often business users have lacked understanding about the actual time and costs involved with deploying a new application. There are now methods emerging that will give business users insight into the real impact of a new purchase request. This knowledge can help users make more informed decisions but use available resources in a more prudent manner.
Securing data inside and outside of the cloud. Users have grown accustomed to single sign-on access to their in-house applications and would like this convenience for their SaaS and cloud applications as well. Moreover, with high-profile security breaches dominating the news, they’re gaining an appreciation for the need to safeguard data in the cloud just as is being done with their in-house applications.

Enter intelligent workload management. In this model, the workloads that make up an application are injected with intelligence about who and how they can be accessed. This frees IT from several obstacles. First, it provides a basis for automating tasks such as provisioning accounts that have long mired down IT staff. Second, it provides a framework for managing those applications, regardless of whether they reside in a physical, virtual or cloud environment.

These shifts have an opportunity to do more than just save time. They can help bridge the gap between business and IT staff, fostering a more cooperative environment. Free from the Sisyphean tasks of manual identity management, IT staff will gain an opportunity to shine as a strategic player. Instead of spending hours resetting passwords and provisioning accounts, they can uncover new opportunities to truly add value to business users.

And business users, who are all too aware that their rogue applications put the organization at risk, may be more willing to engage IT when this gives them the ability to consume SaaS and cloud apps in a more secure and streamlined manner.

Security in the wake of WikiLeaks

LucySullivan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 21:27:00 GMT

In the face of the WikiLeaks data breaches, governments and enterprises in critical industries will clamp down much more severely to ensure they have all internal and external user entitlements and access closely monitored and controlled. Managing identities will not be enough. There will be investigations into how currently deployed identity, access and security technologies match up against today's risks. This will drive increased considerations around strong authentication methods that meet the newly assessed risk per user type, use case and industry profile.

Such awareness is likely to drive key shifts in identity and security management over the next year.

First and foremost, integration will become even more critical. Enterprises will evaluate how to connect more critical applications, regardless of whether they reside inside the firewall or out in the cloud, via a strong identity management foundation in order to have a “single pane of glass” view into all users who are accessing critical resources and data. In a related move, enterprises will demand the ability to certify this access in order to meet security and compliance audits.

Second, enterprises will move towards monitoring user activity much more closely. This can be achieved by marrying identity management and security information and event management (SIEM). This way, enterprises can see not only which user has access to what, but specifically what users are doing within each application. By generating real-time reports on usage, businesses can certify that they’re controlling access rights appropriately. (i.e., at 2:35pm, J. Smith accessed 100 customer records within Salesforce.com). This knowledge is critical from a security standpoint, and may also prove to be an integral piece of evidence in legal proceedings if a breach does occur.

Third, we’ll see an increased focus on privileged user access. Enterprises will develop more stringent rules for assigning privileged access (i.e., no sharing of privileged passwords, no use of default passwords, etc.) and invest in technologies to provide privileged users unique IDs and passwords that can also be tracked.

2011 will be a year of increased focus on identity and access management in light of even more daunting security challenges. The heightened consciousness of these challenges will drive heightened considerations around how to mitigate these risks in new and compelling ways.

What are the new steps your enterprise is taking towards a building a secure identity foundation that will minimize security risks?

The benefits of IWM for enterprises

RichardWhitehead — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 20:51:00 GMT

We talk a lot here at Novell about intelligent workload management. I thought I?d take a moment to back up and explain what we mean by a workload. A workload is an integrated set of an operating system, middleware and the application that accomplishes a specific computing task. There are a number of scenarios where it would be beneficial for workloads to be mobile and intelligent.

Optimizing IT investments
First, workloads should be optimized for performance. The volatility and frenetic pace of change make it nearly impossible to plan adequately for the right computing resources. Inevitably, enterprises have too few resources for their emerging needs, or have compute resources sitting idle. What if the workload itself could be performance-optimized?

This way, it would recognize once it was hitting its capacity and automatically seek out additional computing resources to meet spikes in demand. There?s no need for manual intervention, and no need to wake the IT guy in the middle of the night when the server crashes.

Strengthening security
Increased public scrutiny and regulatory mandates require enterprises to have tighter control over user identities. Yet as any system administrator will tell you, administering these identities is extremely time-intensive if done manually. Moreover, as more and more business users consume SaaS and cloud applications on their own, it becomes exceedingly difficult for IT to keep abreast of what?s being used, let alone how many identities it has.

A better alternative would be to have policy-driven workloads that have knowledge about who and how they are to be used. Basically, give the workload an identity. This way, the workload can move between physical, virtual and cloud environments dynamically, within pre-established guidelines. If, for example, a workload contains patients? health information, that workload would automatically recognize this and prevent the workload from being moved to the public cloud. With a consistent framework for managing identities and access controls across physical, virtual and cloud environments, can ensure compliance with security regulations, without IT intervention.

Demonstrating regulatory compliance
Identity-aware workloads can also contain real-time event tracking, monitoring and alerting. This data plays an integral role in an organization?s ability to demonstrate that its security controls have not been breached and that it is complying with relevant regulatory guidelines.

Reducing provisioning cycle times
Workloads are the building blocks for delivering business services. Much like Legos, workloads can be pieced together in any number of ways to serve a business need. Access to a modular assembly of workloads accelerates application provisioning time, giving the business far greater agility.

Ultimately, the ability to swiftly build, secure, manage and measure workloads will transform the way that we work.

No More Separation Anxiety

RichardWhitehead — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:48:00 GMT

On Wall Street, a millisecond delay in compute time could alter the selling price of a share. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a huge loss when you’re transacting millions of shares. To gain maximum performance, banks run high-demand transactions on physical servers. But how do they take advantage of the financial benefits of virtualization and cloud computing?

We’re beginning to see financial institutions and other industries run different components of their ERP and CRM applications across physical, virtual and cloud environments. This way they’re assured the fastest speed and highest degree of security while leveraging the irresistible economic benefits of cloud and virtualization.

Case in point: A major banking house runs its SAP database in a physical environment, its application server on virtual servers in-house and its presentation server in a public cloud. The database is kept within the bank’s firewall, so that all of its confidential information, including customer contacts, is safeguarded. The application server doesn’t require the same performance as the database so it can be run on virtual servers. And because the presentation server contains no confidential data whatsoever, the bank can host those application components (or workloads) in the public cloud without breaching any security or regulatory guidelines.

The structure of an application like SAP lends itself to being separated out into discrete workloads. Of course this model doesn’t work for all applications, but for those that do, there are significant financial and simplicity benefits to be gained. It’s actually not a new concept. Many of us already use applications that run in separate environments. When I access iTunes, for example, the application may run on my desktop, but the iTunes store and its associated data run in the cloud.

The goal is to give organizations access to capacity across physical, virtual and cloud environments to maximum agility and financial gains. The next logical step is to make it easy to access these environments. We need management tools that can automatically apply policies that determine where each workload can run and who can interact with them. We need solutions that determine, for example, whether a new workload could safely run in a public cloud or if it needs to be maintained in-house. This needs to take place effortlessly. After all, users don’t care where an application is running, as long as it runs. Obtaining such tools will enable organizations to leverage virtual and cloud and ensure security and regulatory compliance, without creating IT headaches.

Are you running applications like SAP or PeopleSoft across physical and virtual environments? Do you see a value in doing so in your business?

What is an Identity-Infused Enterprise?

Jay — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:43:00 GMT

Identity is the core to everything that happens in the enterprise. From something as simple as granting access to resources to tasks as complicated as ensuring compliance, you need to be able to answer the question “Who has access to what?” As enterprises are moving into the cloud, this becomes even more important. We’re going to be talking a lot about the idea of the identity-infused enterprise and I wanted to start the conversation here.

Data protection has moved beyond the realm of the security wonk to an issue of utmost importance to the CEO. Threats no longer arise from lone wolves and script kiddies but from military-grade techniques aimed straight at corporate data. Simultaneously, executives are pressed to validate compliance with ever-changing business regulations. If a CEO does certify compliance and something goes amiss, he can be held personally liable. That’ll make anyone stand up and pay attention. After all, no executive wants to have their stippled drawing in the Wall Street Journal.

So how are businesses supposed to tackle these new challenges? Identity management is a critical first step.

Identity controls form the foundation of a secure and compliant enterprise. Without a strong identity management infrastructure, the complex security and compliance requirements that beset today's organizations are almost impossible to achieve. It forms the basis of how you allow people to access and interact with company resources. If we don’t have a good idea of who’s who in the organization and what they’re allowed to do, it’s not feasible to expect that we can truly enforce security measures.

This is doubly true in the cloud. Without a strong, overarching identity management infrastructure, we must rely on the disparate access control measures of each individual cloud service provider. This manual approach is untenable, rife with human error and high labor costs. Businesses need one central place to manage access and control identities. This way, they can enact comprehensive security protocols to protect all assets.

Having an intelligent, cloud-ready environment enables businesses to establish and enforce one set of policies, regardless of where their applications reside. This approach also prevents users from taking action in the cloud that would be prohibited within the boundaries of the enterprise. Businesses are then able to consume SaaS and other cloud solutions, without adding risk. This model addresses the joint challenges of security and compliance.

Security concerns are the #1 reason businesses have held back from adopting cloud solutions. However, they also need to be concerned about compliance issues. Executives are leery of relying on cloud providers’ assurances that they’ll meet compliance requirements. After all, auditors aren’t going to care whether the business is working with an outside provider. They’ll still hold the company’s officers ultimately accountable for measuring up to compliance rules.

By providing capabilities such as single sign-on, auditing capabilities and provisioning/deprovisioning across in-house and cloud applications, enterprises can control the entitlements employees have to enterprise resources—a necessary first step for certifying compliance with myriad regulations. The next step is to periodically review access rights and verify the right individuals have access to the right resources. Further on, enterprises will want techniques that make it easy to review how they measure up to the latest security and regulatory mandates.

What are your thoughts about identity in the enterprise? Do you buy in to the idea of an identity-infused enterprise?

New Technology Isn’t Always the Answer

RichardWhitehead — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:35:00 GMT

I know this probably sounds like sacrilege coming from a technology vendor, but new technology doesn’t always equate to improved productivity. That’s particularly so when it comes to mergers and acquisitions.

In addition to the business stress involved with merging together two organizations, there are looming questions about which whose technology will remain in use. Case in point: A manufacturer that’s a huge Novell shop was recently acquired by a larger firm that’s a big Microsoft shop. Quickly, the two IT departments began butting heads over which platform would survive in their environment. Instead of solving real problems of bringing together the two organizations, they consumed significant energy trying to prove which option was best.

Ultimately, they didn’t need to choose. They didn’t need to abandon either technology. And there was no need to learn new systems or make disruptive technology changes in order to work together. They simply needed a way for systems to communicate.

The solution they came to was to make identity management the integration point. By leveraging identity tools that crossed platforms and operating systems, users could continue to work with the same interfaces they were accustomed to. they found a way to connect myriad systems together that was completely transparent to users.

Ultimately, they realized tech fights never succeed. Users are very intractable and resist change. That’s why battles over features and functionality often take years and erode productivity.

The manufacturer’s approach turned out to be a great example of bringing two companies together in a positive manner.

What are some good and bad examples you’ve seen over the years in the wake of mergers and acquisitions?